Agrarian Studies Program Colloquium: “False Equivalencies of the Smallholder Slot: Cash Crop Development in the Brazilian Amazon and Indonesian Borneo”

Gregory Thaler, University of Georgia, Department of International Affairs: “False Equivalencies of the Smallholder Slot: Cash Crop Development in the Brazilian Amazon and Indonesian Borneo”

The core of the Agrarian Studies Program’s activities is a weekly colloquium organized around an annual theme. Invited specialists send papers in advance that are the focus of an organized discussion by the faculty and graduate students associated with the colloquium.

This topic embraces, inter alia, the study of mutual perceptions between countryside and city, and patterns of cultural and material exchange, extraction, migration, credit, legal systems, and political order that link them.

It also includes an understanding of how different societies conceive of the spatial order they exhibit. What terms are meaningful and how are they related?: e.g., frontier, wilderness, arable, countryside, city, town, agriculture, commerce, “hills,” lowlands, maritime districts, inland. How have these meanings changed historically and what symbolic and material weight do they bear?